1. This piece by Brendan Simms for Engelsberg Ideas, What drives Trump 2.0?, surprised me with its delineation of beliefs consistently held by Donald Trump – today more usually portrayed as the very antithesis of consistent – for forty years https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/what-drives-trump-2-0/

What exercised Trump (in the 1980s) was what he regarded as the unfair distribution of the cost of the common defence, especially the way in which – in his view – US allies ‘took advantage’ of his country. This sentiment infused his sulphurous open letter ‘To the American People’, which appeared as a full-page advertisement in the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe on 2 September 1987 (at a cost of $94,801). The background was the ‘tanker war’ during that summer, which had seen US Navy vessels protect international shipping against Iranian attacks, while US allies in the Gulf – and across the world – held back.

2. Here’s another, related Engelsberg Ideas piece, this one on Iran, by Ali Ansari, The Islamic Republic in ruins https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/the-islamic-republic-in-ruins/

The launch of operation ‘Epic Fury’ on the morning of 28 February has been greeted with a mixture of anxiety, apprehension and, among the Iranian opposition at least, exultation. (…) For Trump and his administration, any agreement had to include a wider range of concessions, on missiles, support for proxies and, more vaguely, the Islamic Republic’s treatment of its own people. Commentators were dismissive of this last point, but it probably had a greater impact and influence on Trump’s decision to act than many appreciate. Certainly, without the unprecedented slaughter of Iranians by the regime last January, the moral imperative would have been absent.

3. Two pieces from The Conversation that have caught my eye recently:

How conversation works – and why people with hearing loss rely more on their powers of prediction, by Ruth Corps https://theconversation.com/how-conversation-works-and-why-people-with-hearing-loss-rely-more-on-their-powers-of-prediction-277448

Summoning a single word in your mind and then saying it takes at least 600 milliseconds. Yet the most common gap between one person finishing a speaking turn and the other beginning is around 200 milliseconds, regardless of the language they are speaking. This means we usually start talking too quickly to have planned our response after the other person has finished. Somehow, our brains are always ahead of the conversation.

Pregnancy changes the brain – and we are only beginning to understand how and why by a team from Tübingen University https://theconversation.com/pregnancy-changes-the-brain-and-we-are-only-beginning-to-understand-how-and-why-277565

Researchers scanned the brains of 127 first-time mothers five times: once before conception, twice during pregnancy, and again at one and six months after giving birth. It is the largest study of its kind ever conducted. Brain imaging studies that follow the same people across pregnancy – with scans before conception and after birth – are extraordinarily difficult to run. Researchers must identify women planning to conceive, begin scanning before pregnancy begins, and then track them across months of physiological upheaval.

4. An atmospheric and well-illustrated piece by Liam Denning for Bloomberg Opinion, Finland Is Ready for Russia. Is Anyone Else? https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-opinion-finland-is-ready-russia-arctic/

This is where the West ends. Drive northeast from the Lapland village of Salla for 20 minutes, and route 82 runs into a closed chain-link gate. “Don’t touch,” warns a sign in Finnish. Beyond, up a gentle slope, looms Russia. Finns used to drive across here to fill up on half-price gasoline. That was before Russia started pushing migrants across the two countries’ roughly 830-mile border as human weapons in a hybrid war and then attacked Ukraine. Sealed in 2023, the crossing was deserted when I stopped there on a bright winter morning. Just a lonely stretch of road through Finland’s endless boreal forest, cut short by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s newest Arctic frontier with its oldest adversary.

5. And, finally and with fingers crossed it’s still open access, Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, made available by The Paris Review, where it was first published, to coincide with Clint Bentley’s film of the book being nominated for an Oscar on Sunday https://www.theparisreview.org/fiction/396/train-dreams-denis-johnson